February 2017

February 28, 2017

At the outset of her one-woman show, Turning Page, perfectly staged in the intimacy of Dixon Place on Chrystie Street, Angelica Page explains why her mother’s spirit keeps calling out to her. For one thing, Geraldine Page was an Academy Award winning actress who rose to fame in several Tennessee Williams’ plays, and despite the kind of accolades and honors that anyone at Sunday night’s Oscars would die for, no one has written her biography or truly told her story. Encouraged by a psychic, Angelica Page, Geraldine’s daughter with her third husband Rip Torn, does just that, and the play, Turning Page, as its title suggests, is a journey.

February 25, 2017

Art isn’t easy. So say the characters in Sunday in the Park with George, now in a stellar revival at the newly renovated Hudson Theater. Part heady yet playful art history, part love story, the imaginative creation of painter Georges Seurat and his muse Dot from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, has as its central conceit the painting of his famed “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” Directed by Sarna Lapine, with Jake Gyllenhaal as the paint-aholic, famous for pointillism, you wonder, how does a person apply color like that, his hands moving in a staccato to the music. Dot, his appropriately named mistress, sits patiently for him but also attempts to distract the artist with daily living. For one thing, she’s carrying his child. Annaleigh Ashford is charming, as she eye rolls, speaking with a slight nasality reminiscent of Judy Holliday. And can she sing!

February 16, 2017

Some men just don’t get old: Dark glasses do not hide JohnLloyd Young’sprom date good looks. He may be hiding from his girly fans’ swoons, but on the night we attended his Café Carlyle run, the audience was passionate about another side of this Jersey Boys’ career, his efforts to lobby for arts education. So when this dimple chinned crooner who hearkens back to your coming of age tells you he has serenaded Karen Pence, Lynne Cheney, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden,his bipartisan activism has meaning, as he launches into “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

February 14, 2017

The wild party at the Imperial Theater known as Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 is not your usual samovar affair. This entertainment, referencing 70 pages of Tolstoy’s masterpiece War & Peace, has its own backstory: two downtown versions had the performers mingling among the guests, diners at a banquet. While that novelty is not repeated on Broadway, the audience is privy to the gesture. The Imperial Theater is converted to a kind of supper club, music at center, with tables all the way to the stage, although the staging is not distinctly separated from the theater’s ample front area. Ramps just about everywhere allow the company to enter and exit, and dance, offering—throwing-- boxed knishes to those strategically seated. Small bars serve vodka at intermission. A coffee table sized book describes the journey of this new musical to Broadway.

February 13, 2017

Sting and J. Ralph composed the song, “The Empty Chair” for the documentary Jim: The James Foley Story. As you see the clip of Sting performing that song at Bataclan, the historic Paris theater, for its opening one year after ISIS terrorists gunned down 89 people there, you cannot help but register that in “The Empty Chair—Live from the Bataclan,” his empathy is so overwhelming, Sting puts himself in the place of the man who was so brutally murdered by ISIS terrorists in 2014, singing, “Keep my place in the empty chair/ Somehow I’ll be There”/ “Vive la Bataclan!”

James Foley, was a photojournalist committed to bringing news from war zones. He was taken captive as he was documenting civilian casualties of war, specifically the Syrian refugees. You may remember him best from a widely seen photo of Jim kneeling beside “Jihadi John,” the man who would behead him. The film was made by his childhood friend, Brian Oakes, and features Foley’s family, friends, fellow journalists in the field, and fellow captives, speaking about the life, integrity of this man, and his final days.

Just before the Grammy’s, I had a chance to speak to Sting, on tour with his new album, 57th and 9th, and J. Ralph about their work on “The Empty Chair,” now nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar.

February 11, 2017

A musical of outsized passions as only AndrewLloyd Webber could compose, Sunset Boulevard trades in hyperbole. “The greatest star of all,” in the words of Max, her homme d’affaires, Norma Desmond is camp drama queen extraordinaire. With Glenn Close in the role, reprising her Tony-winning performance of 22 years ago at the Palace Theater, Norma is petit as she is large. Need dominates her manipulations so acutely, only the powerhouse chops of the actress who put the word fatal in Fatal Attraction could pull off this tour de force of fragility and grand delusion.

February 07, 2017

David Oyelowo, so brilliant in a recent theater production of Othello, playing the king against Daniel Craig’s Iago, is now a king again in Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom. Groomed to take the throne of Botswana, Seretse Khama is studying in London where he meets an office girl, Ruth Williams (the lovely, angelic Rosamund Pike). They fall in love. Let us just say, in this period drama based on a true story, the racism works both ways; and the colonialism is in-your-face exploitative. Some lines in this movie had the audience cheering: one wag, predicting the white woman would not last as the king’s wife in dusty Africa opines, “Wait till she finds out, there’s no Buckingham Palace in Botswana.” And when Ruth Williams is picked out of the typing pool, she asserts, “I’m no office girl.” Every time a British official condescends to the king, he offers a sherry, a double dig as in Botswana the blacks are not allowed to drink.

February 06, 2017

It’s a given: boys left to their own devices can come to no good. In the fine MCCTheater production of YEN, a British import, at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the unformed men in question are brothers by the same mother, one static, almost comatose in front of a tv when we meet him, the younger bouncing off walls in paint peeling squalor. Then a wasted mess of a woman comes to visit, as an unseen character barks from a distance, disturbing, and a testament to the power of the drama we create in our imaginations—if we are trusted by good writing, as we are in Anna Jordan’s script. Praise to Lucas Hedges as the taciturn Hench in his theater debut just as he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in Manchester By the Sea, and to his foil Bobbie (Justice Smith). And to the women in this story: Ari Graynor as Maggie, their neglectful mom, dead drunk on first appearance, and Stefania LaVie Owen as Jennifer, a neighboring girl from Wales whose nickname is the play’s title, and wistful hope, as a yen might suggest.

February 03, 2017

After you have seen more of Lena Dunham’s body than that of any other serious actress, there’s always the question of how you will greet her in the flesh, clothed and social, as at the spectacular HBO party thrown for the dynamic Girls quartet at Cipriani 42nd Street this week. Guests had just come from Alice Tully Hall, from a preview of an opening double episode, and a second, the first featuring Dunham’s Hannah sunbathing her most private part in Montauk. That moment gave pause to a more demure Maggie Gyllenhaal who revealed that she shows skin in her new series, “The Deuce,” in which she plays a prostitute. “I come from an older generation of women,” said Gyllenhaal with regard to Dunham’s unashamed nakedness and frank display of sexuality. No matter, everyone applauds Dunham’s brilliance as a writer and actress: her brave approach to normalizing the female image in every perfect imperfection is simply groundbreaking.

Calling his Cafe Carlyle show, “Does This Song Make Me Look Fat?” Isaac Mizrahi signals surreal leaps of fancy from music, to looks, to insecurities. Who could ask for more from an evening? Multitalented, the fashion designer/ entertainer croons cabaret standards backed by a great band, his act sprinkled with self-mocking quips recalling Joan Rivers at her most cheeky! Really, what’s not to love?